“I think he—Oh, good morning, Roshaun. Right over there…” There was another pause. “Not right now, sweetie.”
Nita resolved to take a look at Roshaun’s profile. Maybe there’s something I can do to help… Then again, she could imagine Dairine’s response to this. It was best to leave matters alone, perhaps.
“Did you get all your homework done?”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Both kinds.”
“Do wizards get homework assignments?”
“Not as such, Daddy. Just some reading I was doing.” Earlier that morning, Nita had been going over the “Bindings and Strictures” material again; it was complex, but fortunately most of the strictures, especially the Binding Oath, could be used only once, anyway.
“Well, as long as the schoolwork’s done. Anything you need there?”
Nita sighed. “Sunblock,” she said. “I burned yesterday.”
“I thought you could do a wizardry for that.”
“I got distracted, and I forgot…”
“That’s bad for your skin, honey. You be more careful.”
“I will,” Nita said. “Just leave it in my room, okay? I can pop out later and pick it up.”
“Okay, I’ll leave it on the bed. Uh-oh…here comes Carmela. I should get off. Things start getting lively when she turns up.”
Nita grinned. “Is she getting a lot of practice at the Speech?”
“I think there’s more going on than that,” Nita’s dad said, “but you’d better talk to your sister…She’ll fill you in.”
“Okay. Talk to you later, Daddy!”
“You have a good time, sweetie. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Daddy. Bye!”
The print on the page in the manual in Nita’s lap said, “Connection broken, JD 2452749.06806.” Nita shut the manual and leaned back, looking around her. Down by the main holding pen, Kuwilin was still scattering feed for the flying sheep. Nita got up, dusted the sand off herself, and went to see if he needed any help.
By the time she got there, he was leaning over the pen’s fence, watching the sheep munch up their feed. There were always faint sucking and snorting noises when they did this. Their lips were prehensile, expert at picking up the feed pellets and ironwood seed while avoiding the sand, but every now and then they got greedy and wound up doing a lot of spitting.
Nita leaned on the fence beside Kuwilin, watching the sheep. “It takes such a long time every day to feed them,” she said.
“Well, too much at once and they get sick,” Kuwilin said. “Was that your ‘dad’? How is he?”
“He’s okay. But my sister sounds like she’s having some problems. I think she wishes she were here. And the exchange wizards…I think she’s having problems with one of them.” Nita pushed her hair back from where the sea breeze had blown it in her face again. “She’ll work it out. Was Kit helping you again?”
“Yes, he was,” Kuwilin said, “and if you two didn’t have better things to do with yourselves, I’d take you on as migrant volunteer labor. He’s getting very good at relieving them of the shesh. They hardly notice.” Kuwilin sighed, a sound that humans and Alaalids had in common. “Which is good, because this time of year, it’s hard to keep them in one place for long. They want to wander. And if they run into another big migratory group, half of them may not come back. Of course,” Kuwilin added, “they do pass directional information back and forth…so I might lose fifty this autumn and get a hundred and fifty back next spring. It depends if they like where they’ve been better than where they’re going.” He smiled.
“They’re not birds,” Kit said, running up with Ponch lolloping along behind
him.
“What?”
“The things Ponch was chasing last night. They’re not birds: They’re bats. Sort of. With fur. And they have antennae, and flaps.”
“Flaps?”
Kit shrugged. “Maybe they’re more like webbed feet.”
“They sing, too,” Quelt’s tapi said. “Have you heard them? Well, maybe not yet: We were still eating latemeal when they would have been singing, the other night and last night, too. You can hear them better if you go up the hill behind the house. They’re mating this time of year, and the singing can go on for hours. It can keep you up for hours, too.”
Ponch abruptly got between Kuwilin and Kit with yet another stick in his mouth. “Where is he finding all these?” Kuwilin said, grabbing it and trying to take it out of Ponch’s mouth. Ponch gripped hard on the stick and shook his head back and forth, fighting with Kuwilin. “We could be rich, with all the ironwood he brings home. I should hire you all. You do more work around here than Quelt does!”
“I wouldn’t let her hear you say that,” Nita said under her breath, and laughed.
“Well, it’s true!” And Kuwilin laughed as well. “But it’s not her fault, I know. She has more important things to be doing for the world, and we try not to bother her about chores.”
“When did you find out she was a wizard?” Kit said.
Ponch jumped up and down, growling, with the stick in his mouth. Kit took it and threw it, and Ponch chased off after it. “Why, she just came in at firstmeal one morning and told us,” Kuwulin said. “I guess that would be a couple of hundred years ago now—”
“Two hundred and sixty,” said Demair, coming out of the house and down to the pen with a jug and a cup of sepah for her husband. “You should come in and wash,” she said. “You smell of ceiff.”
“I always smell of ceiff,” said Kuwilin. “So does everything here, even these Earth people. They’ll probably go home smelling that way. We should bottle some of the air over the pen and send it home with them, labeled ‘A Souvenir of Alaalu.’”
Kit snorted with laughter. Nita jabbed him in the ribs with one elbow. “They’ll have to bottle you, too,” she said. To Kuwilin, she said, “Was that before her Ordeal, or after?”
“‘Ordeal?’” Demair said. “Oh, you mean the Own Choice. After, I suppose.” She looked at Nita in slight perplexity. “‘Ordeal’—is that what they call it in your world? Is it normally dangerous for you?”
Nita was taken aback. “Well, yes, in that you usually wind up fighting with the Lone Power, one way or another—”
Both Demair and Kuwilin looked blank. “Who?”
Kit looked surprised. “You know, the Lone Power. You do know the Lone One?”
“Invented death?” Nita said. “Got thrown out of Timeheart? Runs around trying to get sentient species to willingly buy into death?”
“Oh, that one,” Demair said, and laughed. “Certainly, we know about her. But she’s no problem.”
“‘No problem,’” Nita said softly. Then she looked around at the landscape and thought of the Cities as well, clean, safe, full of smiling people; all in all, it was a world where there seemed to be no such thing as crime or disaster or hatred or anything of the kind. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe I see your point.”
“But how come she’s not?” Kit said.
Kuwilin and Demair looked at each other, perplexed again. “I always assumed it had something to do with our species’ Choice,” Kuwilin said, “but I wouldn’t be an expert. Quelt would know more about it, I’d imagine.”
Nita looked around. “Where is she now?” she said.
“Up in the meadows. She said she had to talk to the wind about something.” Nita nodded. This was an expression that she’d heard a number of times recently and that most often seemed to mean that the person had something she wanted to think about in private.
“But to finish answering your first question,” Kuwilin said, “she just came in that morning and said, ‘I’m a wizard, and in a few years I have to take over from the one we’ve got.’ She showed us some wizardry; we were very impressed. And then her mentor, the old wizard, Vereich, came along and said, ‘I hear my successor is come into her power; we’d better start work.’ Of course, he knew he wasn’t long for the body at that point—he must have been four thousand or so then. No, five, now that I think of it. A delightful old man; I still hear from him occasionally.”